This chapter covers the copious non-technical reasons for preferring storage networks, from the legal implications of Sarbanes-Oxley to the economy of scale created by their usage. Discover the other advantages storage networks could provide to your business within.

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Just as the effects of the recent economic downturn have been universally
felt across all sectors and industries, likewise do the principle concepts
discussed in this chapterthe commoditization of hardware and storage
utilization efficienciesapply to all IT environments, regardless of the
size or the nature of the business application. This chapter sets the stage for
understanding the storage network as a value-add to the firm insofar as it is
capable of alleviating the management and financial burdens associated with
direct-attached storage (DAS).

Networked storage offers significant business advantages over DAS, and the
impact of these benefits can be quantified and measured. To understand the
nature of the business benefits of networked storage, a brief, general
discussion of overall IT spending and the specifics of storage spending is
required and provides a basis for the remainder of the analysis performed in
later chapters.

Storage Management Matters

In May, 2003, author Nicholas Carr garnered much attention with a
HarvardBusiness Review article on the strategic worth of
information technology. The article's provocative title, "IT
Doesn't Matter," bespoke Carr's argument that the commoditization
of information technology solutions has essentially depleted the strategic
advantage of information technology as a whole. In "IT Doesn't
Matter," Carr states succinctly, "What makes a resource truly
strategicwhat gives it the capacity to be the basis for a sustained
competitive advantageis not ubiquity, but scarcity."1 Carr
points to innovations, such as electricity and rail transportation, which
offered competitive advantages to early adopters, but whose value diminished
over time as the use of these technologies became common place.

In 2004, Carr expanded his position in his book, Does IT Matter?
Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, in which
he urges readers to decrease IT spending, to avoid being an early adopter
whenever possible, and to focus on "vulnerabilities" instead of
"opportunities" where critical services are at risk.2

Carr could not be more accurate. It is also important to understand, however,
that investment in storage networks allows firms to decrease storage spending
and focus on service vulnerabilities. In addition, Fibre Channel SANs are well
past the early adopt phase. Investment in storage networking technologies (not
just Fibre Channel, but IP-based storage solutions as well) can help companies
become more efficient and therefore more competitive.

NOTE

Everett Rogers originally outlined the concept of the early adopter in his
work The Diffusion of Innovations. Detailed discussion of Rogers'
work and how it applies to product adoption life cycles follows in Chapter 4,
"How It Should Be Done: Implementation Strategies and Best
Practices."

Understanding competitive forces is a fundamental premise of business
leadership. Harvard Business School professor and author Michael Porter is a
renowned expert on strategy and competition. He has written extensively on the
nature of competition between rival firms and nations. Porter's
groundbreaking essay, "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy," was
first published in 1979; twenty-five years later, Porter's "Five
Forces," as they have come to be known, still aptly describe the interplay
between rival firms' strategic endeavors.

As Porter outlined, the five main forces shaping competition between firms in
similar industries are the following:

Buyer bargaining power

Supplier bargaining power

The threat of substitute products

Rivalry

Barriers to entry

In his essay, Porter lists "economies of scale" and "cost
disadvantages independent of size" as two of the major sources of
"barriers to entry."3 Although "learning curves,"
"experience curves," and "economies of scale" are concepts
typically applied to manufacturing environments, these concepts also have
distinct applications in IT, relative to the management of IT assets, and
storage assets in particular.

Without a doubt, one of the most significant vulnerabilities facing companies
today is the state of enterprise storage, now in overwhelming disarray following
the deployment at breakneck speed of over two million DAS external disk units
worldwide between the years of 1999 and 2003. The total number of DAS versus
networked storage units sold between 1999 and 2003 is shown in Table 1-1.

Jon William Toigo outlined the storage management problem facing IT managers
in his book, The Holy Grail of Storage Management, published in 2000.
Toigo stated clearly and early on that corporate IT departments would face
serious challenges in the coming years with managing data storage. The need for
online or near-online data and the lack of a rational strategy for dealing with
storage growth indicated that in a short amount of time, companies would have
their hands full of storage problems.5 Few in corporate IT today are
in a position to disagree with Toigo.

Storage networks allow firms to drive down operational costs and increase
economies of scale to remain competitive. At the same time, storage networks
allow firms to address critical business vulnerabilities. Although storage
networks alone do not magically solve all storage-related problems, a networked
storage infrastructure does help increase operational and utilization
efficiencies, which ultimately lowers the overall storage total cost of
ownership (TCO).

NOTE

Storage networks do not intrinsically solve the problems related to data and
information management, but in later chapters I demonstrate how economies of
scale with regard to storage management (and the cost advantages of increased
storage utilization) have a significant impact on the firm's bottom
line.

The ubiquity of information technology resources in corporate datacenters
underscores the drop in prices for IT products and the diminished magnitude of
the capital outlays required to build an enterprise-level IT infrastructure.
This ubiquity is the tangible evidencethe hangover, if you willfrom
the party that heralded the advent of the New Economy.